On Early Trips to the Movie Theater

I think you can tell a lot about a movie fan's relationship with films and filmgoing when you look at what they watched when they were kids.  So, as a thought exercise, I worked out the first twenty movies I remember seeing in theaters:

Oliver & Company (1988)

The Little Mermaid (1989)

The Rescuers Down Under (1990)

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Wayne's World (1992)

Newsies (1992)

Aladdin (1992)

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

The Lion King (1994)

Immortal Beloved (1995)

Batman Forever (1995)

Pocahontas (1995)

Muppet Treasure Island (1996)

Bed of Roses (1996)

James and the Giant Peach (1996)

The Stupids (1996)

Romeo + Juliet (1996)

Star Wars Trilogy: Special Editions (1997)

I think this list is probably missing a few things, because my memory isn't great.  For instance, I'm not sure whether I first saw "Jurassic Park" in a theater or on video.  These are just the titles I'm absolutely certain of.  However, you can see the patterns pretty clearly.  For my family, trips to the movie theater were a special occasion.  I mostly saw Disney musicals with my parents or on outings with relatives until I was a teenager.  Then I started going to movies with friends and picking more interesting titles.  Often what we watched wasn't as important as who we were going with - visiting cousins, school friends, or kids we were babysitting.  

So, I know the circumstances of every one of these theater trips.  "Wayne's World" is a special outlier, which I saw with my Girl Scout troop around the age of ten.  I had zero context for that film, having never seen "Saturday Night Live" at that point.   It was the most bizarre filmgoing experience of my young life.  The first movie I actually picked to see on my own was "Mrs. Doubtfire" for my birthday, and that was because I'd accidentally missed a showing of "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit."  "Immortal Beloved" was a film my mother picked, a Beethoven biopic starring Gary Oldman.  One of her favorite films is "Amadeus," and she was expecting  "Immortal Beloved" to be something similar, but completely missed that it was R-rated for copious sex and nudity.  I don't think we went to a movie theater together again until "March of the Penguins" in 2005.

My parents weren't regular theatergoers, and mostly viewed theater trips as a convenient activity to get us out of their hair as we got older.  The only time I remember them going out to see a movie without us kids was "The Last Emperor" in 1987, and it was a big deal.  Keep in mind that we watched far more movies than this on video and through television broadcasts.  My family regularly started renting movies on VHS around 1992 - that was when and how I first saw "Star Wars."  My parents were happy to wait a few extra months to see new releases, even the highly anticipated ones.  I had already seen "Titanic" twice with different groups of friends before they finally rented it on VHS.

I always had a special love of the movie theater, though, because it made moviegoing an event.  I remember all of these trips with a rare kind of clarity.  "Oliver & Company," for instance, somehow had a trailer for the intense civil rights drama "Mississippi Burning" attached.  I thought I'd dreamed it until I found corroborating newspaper articles scolding the theater exhibitors for this decision years later.  Most of the earlier films were watched at my hometown's local two-screen theater, which has since been converted into a community theater space.  It was next to a drugstore, so we always snuck in our own snacks.  When I went with friends, it was usually to the theater attached to a nearby mall, and after 1996, a few towns over to a new 12-screen theater with stadium seating.  

Thanks to the pandemic, my theater trips have been severely limited over the last few years.  I've been antsy about being away from the big screen for so long, and its good to look back and remember why.  The movie theaters helped me to love the movies, but visiting them was never just about the movies.

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